छोटी सी एक बनायेंगे नैया

The only number in the Hamara Sansar score that puts all three of its principal voices on the same record: Mohammed Rafi, Shamshad Begum and Zohrabai Ambalewali together, a combination that almost never recurs anywhere in Rafi's early discography. Atul's Song A Day files it as a boatman's song, and the title carries the whole idea — a small boat, built by hand, sufficient for the crossing. In a film called 'Our World', meaning the household, that image reads as a household being assembled out of very little, which makes this the score's answer song to the two solos of complaint that sit either side of it.

Gobind Ram writes it as a rowing song: a mid-tempo tune with a swinging, repeating pulse underneath it, the kind of gait that imitates oars and lets a group of voices lock together without any of them having to lead. The three singers are used in alternation and then in unison rather than as a conversation, which is the older chorus convention rather than the duet convention that would dominate the next decade. It is also a useful early sample of Rafi in company: his voice at twenty is lighter and less anchored than it would later be, and against Shamshad's metallic edge and Zohrabai's fuller lower register it sits noticeably on top of the texture.

Naiya is not a ship; it is the diminutive, the little boat you can build yourself, and Ramesh Gupta's opening insists on the smallness twice over — chhoti si, a small one, just one. That doubling is the point of the lyric. The crossing-the-water figure is one of the oldest in Indian devotional and folk poetry, where the river is the world and the far bank is deliverance, and the usual anxiety attached to it is that the boat is inadequate. Here the inadequacy is claimed rather than feared: the promise is not to build a boat big enough, but to build a small one and go anyway. Sung by three voices instead of one, it becomes a collective undertaking rather than a personal hope, which is what makes it fit a film about a joint family.

Hamara Sansar was directed by Shanti Kumar for Prakash Pictures from a script by Girish Pandit, and its credit list — Jeevan doubling as Munshiji and Kailash, two women listed only as Badi Bahu and Manjhli Bahu, two male characters cast twice over as children and as adults — describes a family chronicle running across a generation. No plot summary survives. Atul's Song A Day, writing about this record in 2014, noted that only the audio is available and asked readers who knew how the song had been picturised to come forward; none of the sources consulted for this entry answers that question. The film failed commercially and no print is in circulation.

The record's chief claim on attention now is the line-up. Rafi's 1945 output is small enough to be listed in full, and a three-way with the two leading female voices of the moment is a rarity in it — the Millennium Post profile of Gobind Ram singles out this trio when it comes to describe the film. It survives on the Saregama reissue, where the label credits only Rafi and Shamshad Begum, and on 78-rpm transfers circulated by collectors. Beyond that it has had no independent afterlife: it was never covered, never re-recorded, and is known today almost entirely to people who came to it looking for early Rafi.